Supreme Court Rules For Monsanto In Patent Case 579
Pigskin-Referee writes in with news of the Supreme Court's decision in a dispute between Monsanto and an Indiana farmer over patented seeds. "The Supreme Court has sustained Monsanto Co.'s claim that an Indiana farmer violated the company's patents on soybean seeds that are resistant to its weed-killer. The justices, in a unanimous vote Monday, rejected the farmer's argument that cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator are not covered by the Monsanto patents, even though most of them also were genetically modified to resist the company's Roundup herbicide. Justice Elena Kagan says a farmer who buys patented seeds must have the patent holder's permission. More than 90 percent of American soybean farms use Monsanto's 'Roundup Ready' seeds, which first came on the market in 1996."
Re:This is disgusting!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you read TFA? The farmer knew exactly what he was doing and was trying to get around the patent to save money... he got caught.
The bigger issue here is:
Monsanto has a policy to protect its investment in seed development that prohibits farmers from saving or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farmers must buy new seeds every year.
That's a very harsh policy and they probably charge a premium for their seed, it must be tough to be a farmer nowadays.
Re:The farmer's recourse is to sue to sell (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the car analogy is that if you buy a stolen car, you are in possession of a stolen vehicle , but the real wrong doer is the guy selling 50 stolen cars on his used car lot.
But in that case you do have to forfeit the stolen vehicle, so you are out the money that you paid for it. I guess the thinking is that he has to pay back any profits he made? I don't agree with the decision or the lawsuit, but the car analogy is not that different.
I want to see the flip side of this case (Score:4, Interesting)
The organic farmer selling non-GMO crops who sues for damages 'cause his plants are cross-pollenated by a neighboring farmer using GMO seeds who doesn't follow the guidelines for planting a barrier row of non-GMO plants around the edges of his field.
Another pro-business decision (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/pro-business-decisions-are-defining-this-supreme-court.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Re:This is disgusting!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Monsanto developed the genetically modified seeds, they can restrict their use however they want. Nothing prevents a competitor from developing a strain resistant to a different herbicide. Nothing prevents a farmer from just using normal soybean seeds.
While there may be a case of the big evil Monsanto against the little guy in situations of cross-pollination, or otherwise unintended use of the modified crop, in this case, the "poor farmer" willfully purchased modified seed from a third party, not intended for replantation, to bypass the patent licensing. This situation was the little guy trying to screw the big evil Monsanto.
Re:The farmer's recourse is to sue to sell (Score:4, Interesting)
so there we have the "blame the bean" strategy. Making copies of all of the parts of a car sounds really expensive and hard. Making copies of the beans involved putting them in dirt and waiting.
How far does it go? (Score:5, Interesting)
Monsanto is knowingly not protecting its patent. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not clear on this farmer’s specific case, but Monsanto has lost all rights to protect its patent on any seeds that it allowed to be planted in a non-environmentally control environment, AKA outdoors. Our legal system cannot supersede the basics facts of nature.
If you allow your patented seeds to be planted out doors and allow their pollen to escape freely into the wind, you have no right to tell anyone that they have no right to use seeds produced from their own non-Monsanto plants that happened to have been inadvertently pollenated by Monsanto’s insufficient processes and out right failure to adequately protect its own patent. At best the only recourse that Monsanto has is to fully compensate the lost seed and potential crop of any person that has seeds of this kind in exchange for destroying them.
Monsanto cannot legally protect a patent for seed that they have knowing allowed and opening allowed to enter the world’s ecosystem. There are forces there that no court has the juristiction to control. This is not as simple as returning a lost bag of money found on the side of the road. This is Mother Nature doing what it does. Monsanto is aware of this issue and knows how to protect their patent by only allowing their seeds to be planted inside environmentally controlled green houses. This is a failure on their part to protect their patent.
By the way Monsanto did not create the genes that make this seed resistant. They genes came from another public plant that anyone can own. All they truly should have been allowed to patent was the process of adding the genes to the soybean. They don’t own the genes; and no court has the authority to give the sole right to use the genes to anyone entity. The genes are publicly owed when in the original plant or any other plant that nature choses.
Re:The farmer's recourse is to sue to sell (Score:5, Interesting)
That may have helped ice the unanimous SCOTUS decision, but that's not what the lawsuit was really about. The lawsuit was about planting unauthorized Monsanto seeds, pure and simple. Monsanto is constantly suing farmers who never buy or plant any kind of Monsanto seeds merely because some Monsanto seeds show up in their fields from cross-pollination. In some of these cases Monsanto is even suspected of causing the cross-pollination so they can bring a lawsuit.
http://www.dailytech.com/Monsanto+Defeats+Small+Farmers+in+Critical+Bioethics+Class+Action+Suit/article24118.htm [dailytech.com]
There's a big fight going on between organic farmers and Monsanto over this issue, because the organic farmers don't want the Monsanto seed at all.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/17/local/la-me-gs-organic-farmers-sue-monsanto-to-stop-patent-suits-20120217 [latimes.com]
A quick google search shows dozens of articles about this.
https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+cross+pollination+lawsuit [google.com]
Re:Rock and a hard place (Score:3, Interesting)
. It's an issue of Monsanto using a broken patent system to double-dip into farmers' pockets after locking them into the seeds.
How are farmers locked into the seeds? There is no one holding a gun to farmers heads saying they must use Roundup or Roundup Ready seeds. That is a choice because the combination creates high yields. Why shouldn't the creators of the technology get benefit from it.
What would you say if another company had created the Roundup Ready seeds? Wouldn't it be reasonable for them to make a profit on their investment?
There are a couple of major flaws in your argument.
1. Roundup was marketed starting in the 1970's and Roundup ready seeds were created in 1996. Therefore for over 20 years farmers were using Roundup on non-resistant crops. They had to be very careful to spray enough to kill the weeds but not enough to kill the crop. It was a delicate balance and impacted yields. The GM seeds just allowed farmers to use more herbicide without killing their crops.
2. Monsanto brought Roundup to market in the 1970s, and Monsanto's last commercially relevant United States patent expired in 2000. Since Monsanto no longer holds the patent on Roundup they have to compete in the open market to sell that herbicide. Since Monsanto spent money on R&D that money has to be recouped somewhere. It can not be recouped by selling Roundup at a higher price as they would just be undercut by competitors.
Judges got it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but the patent only applies to the seed made/raised by Monsanto.
Once it's been through a single planting / harvesting - it is no long the exact same seed - mutations have set in.
Unless it is 100% genetically identical to the seed sold by Monsanto, whether or not it carries the RR gene sequence is irrelevant - the patent applies to the entire gene sequence, not just the bit that makes it RR.
So once a single dna chain is modified (ie through natural selection) - it is no longer the patented product.
End of story.
The judges are WRONG.
Re:The farmer's recourse is to sue to sell (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the key word here is "sold." In the old-fashioned days, when you bought a physical object, it would become yours to do with as you will: to eat, plant, or whatever else you may want to do (including silly things like using them as alternative flooring in your house).
In other words, by the strict definition of the verb "to sell," the seller loses control over what the buyer does with the item once the item has changed hands. IANAL but what worries me about this case is that the idea of selling something for limited set of purposes seems to be implicitly accepted. Why? How can the elevator sell seeds "for" one purpose but not another, and why is the court willing to respect those conditions? It seems like a huge backward step for property rights and a worrisome precedent from that perspective.
Re:This is disgusting!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, he was deliberatly trying to get around the patent. But he was doing so with techniques that have been unequivocally legal for millenia. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to replant seeds from last year. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to select for herbicide resistance by spraying plants and keeping the ones that lived. Now those things are illegal.
The US government and Monsanto have clearly overstepped the limits of legitmate power. This is why we have the 9th and 10th amendments. Portraying Monsanto as an innocent and unwilling victim is absurd. They know exactly what they are doing, destroying traditional agriculture for their own profit.
Re:This is disgusting!! (Score:4, Interesting)
The details of RoundupReady gene is a little bit different than this...
Monsanto found a bacteria in their chemical plant wastewater which was eating Glyphosphate. They examined this bacteria and isolated the gene it was using to break down the herbicide. They introduced this gene into plants, which now also break down the herbicide.
In my research involving a human pathogen, the development of drug resistance to some drugs mostly involves duplications, while for other drugs it mostly involves point mutations to relevant enzymes.
Do you have a citation for what is the most common mechanism of Glyphosphate resistance in weed plants? This is not a topic where I follow the literature extensively, so I am really curious.